Back in March, we wrote about how to talk to Michael Crichton and his ilk. It seems almost impossible that there could be anyone left who denies that the Earth's climate is changing as a result of human activity. But amazingly enough, they do exist and they are extremely vocal: evidence the Competitive Enterprise Institute ads that we wrote about earlier this week.

Now WorldChanging, a blog we read regularly, has issued a call for help in dealing with these poor fools whose heads are in the sand (or somewhere less polite). Having noticed a rise in posted comments from "climate denialists," the folks at WorldChanging are calling for some groupthink. Here's what they're after:

"We would then like to come up with a clear, no-more-than-one-paragraph message which can be posted after trolling comments a) informing the commenter that, if they are serious in looking for more info, that info is available and they can access it on this page, and b) letting other readers know that the debate is over, and those questioning the scientific consensus at this point probably have another agenda, and we're moving on. That message could even begin 'The debate on climate change is over.'"

Many people have put together good lists of the top climate myths and why they're false. We're fans of Coby Beck's "How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic" on his blog A Few Things Ill Considered. But WorldChanging is calling for something much more concise.

The only tricky part is that oversimplifying can lead to the kind of not-quite-accurate information that those same skeptics will jump on. This is one reason they've been able to maintain the traction they have, even in the face of overwhelming, daily mounting evidence for greenhouse-gas-driven climate change. This is hugely complicated stuff, and every time you oversimplify you run the risk of making yourself vulnerable to attack.

I'm not sure what the solution here is, but hopefully WorldChanging's call will yield some useful results - something, as Treehugger put it, "more reader-friendly" than what's already out there. Still, a lot of highly user-friendly material is already out there on global warming, from Al Gore's doc and forthcoming book to Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers to thousands of pages of info on the web sites of environmental groups and groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists. It's possible that anyone who's not yet willing to face reality may not be until the evidence is literally in their backyard. But it certainly can't hurt to try.

Image credit: Union of Concerned Scientists